Though its origins have many interdisciplinary antecedents, the concept of performativity is thought to have at

﻿least partly emerged through the notion of speech acts or performative utterances. J.L. Austin, British language

﻿philosopher and author, is thought to have originated the concept of the performative speech act in his book,

﻿How to Do Things with Words, posthumously published in 1962. While the book is an exhaustive exploration of

﻿these terms, his general understanding of a performative utterance (or a performative) is that it is a statement that

﻿“say[s] something as well as do[es] something” (140). The classic example of this is the wedding response, “I do.”

﻿The sentence is a spoken utterance, but it is also an act that takes place in speech.* ﻿

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*Among others, John Searle expands upon Austin's theories by exploring and classifying the different types of
speech acts in his 1969 book, Speech Acts, "Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language," and
Expression and Meaning, published in 1979.